Al Gore suing Al Jazeera over Current TV deal

Jaws are still scraping the floor over the whopping $500 million Qatar-owned Al Jazeera paid for former Vice President Al Gore’s San Francisco startup Current TV.

But Gore, who was to pocket $100 million off the deal, says the cash isn’t flowing. He’s suing Al Jazeera American Holdings I Inc. for fraud and breach of contract, alleging it illegally tried to seize $65 million in escrow funds tied to the deal. He and Current partner Joel Hyatt are suing for undisclosed damages.

To advocate for him, Gore has hired David Boies, who represented the then-Democratic presidential nominee in 2000 when Gore won the popular vote against George W. Bush but lost the electoral College. Boies was also part of the team that convinced the Supreme Court to overturn California’s same sex marriage ban.

“Al Jazeera America wants to give itself a discount on the purchase price that was agreed to nearly two years ago,” Boies said in a statement. “We are asking the court to order Al Jazeera America to stop wrongfully withholding the escrow funds that belong to Current’s former shareholders.”

Al Jazeera’s response: “We think it relates to a commercial dispute between former shareholders of Current Media and Al Jazeera America. We may have further comment once they’ve fully reviewed everything.”

Shortly after the deal was announced last year, the obvious question was why Gore — an environmentalist who starred in the Oscar-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” – would sell to a network owned in part by the oil-rich government of Qatar. (That was an even more obvious question than how Gore was able to pay himself $1.2 million a year for a network whose national audience of 42,000 –– which on most nights could fit inside AT&T Park, located across the street from its studios.)

“Al and I did significant due diligence as part of our evaluation process. We were impressed with all that we learned about Al Jazeera and its journalistic integrity, global reach, award-winning programming, and growing influence around the world, ” Hyatt wrote.

Here is how Gore explained his reasoning and the “due diligence” he did on the deal to Jon Stewart shortly after it went down: